Is British politics in need of some conflict resolution?
Is political discourse becoming, at long last, a bit more civilised? There’s cause for hope. Across the Red Line (Radio 4, Wednesday) has returned, aiming to bring people together across political divides. This is how it works: Radio 4 presenter Anne Mcelvoy chairs a discussion on a given subject between two public figures with two opposing viewpoints. This week it was Rory Stewart and Caroline Flint, a former Conservative MP and a former Labour MP respectively, and the subject was “Should politicians stop worrying about ‘hard-working families’?” After a brief bit of back-and-forth, a conflict resolution specialist, Louisa Weinstein, stepped in to guide the conversation.
Stewart argued that a focus on “hard-working families” diverts attention away from looking after the people in society who can’t work: people who are sick, disabled, and in extreme poverty. He said that political messaging about the “squeezed middle” encourages perfectly well-off people to believe that they are actually disadvantaged.
Flint countered that “hard-working families” are crucial to a functioning economy because if they didn’t work hard, pay tax and play by the rules,
society would collapse and the truly disadvantaged would lose out anyway.
The problem was actually that this wasn’t really a very controversial subject. It was easy to see both sides, and it ended up being a discussion about the intricacies of political messaging rather than any deeply held ideologies.
But the interventions of the conflict resolution specialist were fascinating: she encouraged both debaters to reflect back to one another what they were hearing and understanding by it, and to ask each other open questions about how they had arrived at the beliefs they had. Both Stewart and Flint found this surprisingly difficult, and Weinstein had to intervene repeatedly to remind them to listen and talk directly to each other, and find common ground. All it needed was a more provocative subject.
Speaking of provocative subjects, Americast (Radio 4, Friday), the BBC podcast with a similar format to the Brexitcast and Newscast strands, has been doing an excellent job of following the US election in a congenial and accessible sort of way. This week it began a weekly radio broadcast run on Radio 4 on Friday nights.
It’s addictive, partly because listening to the three presenters – BBC political broadcasters Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Anthony Zurcher – already feels like having a relaxed chat with well-informed pals. The informal ad-libbing style lets you hear exactly when the seasoned currentaffairs experts are really excited by a particular development, when they’re sceptical, and when they’re incredulous, which tells us more than a scripted BBC News item ever could. And, best of all, it lets them be funny. The American election can seem so fraught, but Americast’s take on it is bright, constructive and amazingly humane.
Humanity on the radio is so refreshing. This week’s castaway on Desert Island Discs (Radio 4, Sunday) was Averil Mansfield, the first British woman to be appointed a professor of surgery. She is a fascinating person; now in her eighties, she is a keen lifelong musician as well as a doctor, clever and wry, quite private, compassionate and precise.
Growing up in the 1940s, her school report as a child had said, unpromisingly, “she will never learn to sew”. (Her job involved rather a lot of sewing in the end.) She had lots of stories about people not believing that she was really their surgeon, but: “you do need to retain a sense of humour in this thing, otherwise all is lost.” Her luxury item was a piano, because she remembered her father’s words: “You should always have a piano because you can play it, you can eat off it, and you can sleep under it”.
In Reading the Water (Radio 4, Thursday), we were in the company of fisherman and writer Chris Yates as he attempted to catch a carp the size of “a small submarine” in a secluded lake during lockdown, to the sounds of rippling water, rustling oak leaves, wood pigeons and kingfishers.
“Fishing is not an escape, it’s just a way of changing direction slightly… now and then I just want to be renewed,” he said. Once, he experimented with playing music to the carp. He turned on some Schumann on Radio 3, “and they loved it, I could tell! They all pointed towards me”. But then he accidentally switched the radio to French pop and they all swam away in disgust. Like Desert Island Discs, it was a joy; a quiet restoration of faith in human nature.